So many important lessons can be learned from the Trump election of 2024. But, the reason Trump won has yet to be talked about much. The assumption is that Elon Musk came in at the last minute, after the assassination attempt in July, and put many millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign as the world’s richest man. But to assume that, you would have to believe that money wins elections and that those who raise the most money and spend it will win the election. Of course, the media, which sells ads and makes its money off politics during elections, wants everyone to think that. But it wasn’t true. Kamala Harris spent on her 2024 campaign 1.5 billion dollars and ended up, at the end of it, millions of dollars in debt. She spent more than she had, which was a lot. Who in their right mind gave her money who had that kind of money? I could have told them they were wasting their time. Wait, come to think of it, I did tell them. But they didn’t listen. Reports say that Trump spent much less than that, hovering around the 1 billion dollar mark, which is what many think it takes to run for president these days, but I’m not even sure that is the case. But the bottom line is that Kamala spent a lot of money and didn’t move the needle in any kind of positive direction. So why? That’s the most critical question. If Trump and Kamala spent even more money, why did the money spent work more for one, not the other? So you can’t say that Elon Musk bought Trump the election, that would not be accurate. Instead, something much more important happened, and Trump did a masterful job at it, as we would all expect.
A person’s brand is one of the most essential attributes of their personality; it’s how people come to know you and what they think of you when you aren’t around them anymore. In everything you do in life, you must build your brand and use it to gain cooperation from your peers. I have a very strong brand presence on many fronts. For instance, I was having a fancy dinner with many people with strong opinions about my brand. We were all ordering dessert, and the people with us at this dinner were from all over the world. So I ordered a cake with many special effects to demonstrate how extraordinary the desserts were at this dinner and encourage our guests to be a little daring. After all, I figured my brand was so good that I could handle a little wildness. So I ordered a special cake, which came out with dry ice spewing everywhere. A tree made of cotton candy came out on top of it. Those combinations of things made my dinner guests laugh because of the contrasts. They were not very “manly” things to do and seemed like something they would never expect coming from me. But that’s also why the Trump Dance works for Trump at rallies; it contrasts his tough guy image. That image is his brand, and it’s how people learn the nature of the values of the advocate. Without a brand image to maintain, my ordering the cake and the reaction to it would have just been about food. But I made it into something else to advance why we were having the dinner together in the first place, as a team-building event that people would not soon forget.
Trump has been one of the best in the world at building and applying brands. His family name, Trump, is recognized worldwide and establishes quality and luxury for those who see it. Trump built the brand over a long period and, about ten years ago, decided to use it to put America on its back and to Make America Great Again. When people saw the Trump Brand anywhere in the 80s and 90s, they think of wealth and luxury, which is a way for Trump to take The Power of Positive Thinking and apply it to wealth generation. So when Trump decided to run for office in 2015, he just brought his brand with him and beat Hillary Clinton based on the strength of his brand, as he spent a fraction of the money most campaigns would to win such a high office. When he disrupted the system and everyone in the world came after him, Trump used his brand to rise above the critics in a way only his extensive, positive brand would have allowed. Like my story about the cake, if you have a strong brand, you can provoke much action that either supports or contrasts it. For my dinner guests, expecting an uncompromising gunslinger to shoot anybody who does injustice is a sharp contrast to sitting there eating a chocolate cake with pink cotton candy all over the top. Showing such a moment of comparison within my brand earns trust because it contrasts my customary behavior. But without the brand, there wouldn’t be any opinions or jokes to evolve a dialogue of trust that was needed for such a moment. On a much larger scale, Trump used his brand to carry the lofty goal of Making America Great Again into a value system people felt they could invest in. And they did.
One of my favorite campaign items from the 2024 election is a Trump 2024 switchblade. I obtained it under unusual conditions, and it was undoubtedly one of the best souvenirs of Trump I had ever seen during the election. Trump’s name was on everything, from knives to hats to shirts, flags, glasses, anything and everything. And that was because Trump had built a brand that gave value to obtaining those items. That Trump knife would be just another knife if it didn’t have Trump 2024 written on it. On the other hand, Kamala spent a lot more money trying to create an impression, but her brand didn’t have roots in which people could invest. So, as she tried to make an impression on voters, she did not have a brand that people could understand and invest in. Nobody was rushing out to buy a Harris hat or shirt. But people were flocking to buy a Trump hat. They couldn’t make enough of them. And in the end, that is what ended up mattering most. Even though Elon Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the MAGA movement and Trump himself, it was Trump who built a brand worth investing in. Without the brand, the money was tossed to the wind like drunk gamblers in a casino late at night. The brand allows people to invest in the person who built it, for better or worse. But once you have the brand, you can use it to sell ideas to people who have enough rooting to grab on and take action. And the Democrats, they didn’t do any of that. They tried to create impressions but had no substance behind their brand to sell an idea. That caused them to toss much money at the effort only to have it wasted because there was no brand worth investing in. So the ideas that Democrats had couldn’t be sold to a public so empty that they’d buy any impression. When it came to Trump, people bought into a brand he had built for over 4 decades, and he put it all at risk to become president. And as a result, the brand outlasted the attempts to destroy it. Now, with that brand value, America can do as Trump’s brand indicates: to Make America Great Again. When people see that term, they think of quality, wealth, and tenacity. And the nation can rally to the cause because a brand can sell the idea and sustain the results. Rather than just creating more false impressions that people have become long weary of. And this will be the case for politics over the coming century. It’s not enough to spend money. Instead, the money has to have a brand that people want to invest in and make it their own.
Rich Hoffman
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